Guest Column - Young children who are skin and bones are called “wasted”. The root of the verb “waste” is “to devastate, ruin”, which sadly is all too apt. Severely wasted children are 12 times more like to die of common diseases than children who are not malnourished. And for the survivors, their lives are ruined in the sense that they are more likely to drop out of school, more likely to live in poverty as adults, and more likely to suffer diet related chronic disease later in life.
